


Snow Fall

by tollofthebells



Series: Aurelia Hawke [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Humor, One Shot, Rivalmance, Rivalry, Snow, Snowball Fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 09:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16830163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tollofthebells/pseuds/tollofthebells
Summary: Or, "Fenris and Aurelia take the Frostbacks."





	Snow Fall

It snowed in Kirkwall. Not often, even in the winter, and maybe only a little at a time, but it did. And for _years_ , every snowfall in the Marcher city—light dustings even as they usually were—was enough to confine Fenris to the indoors. Even his drafty and dust-covered mansion, even the piss-stained rotting floors of the Hanged Man were preferable to the frozen-solid ice-laden grounds outside. For _years_ he would not emerge unless sought out by Hawke. Or unless _avoiding_ Hawke. One or the other. 

So if he’d been told, a year prior, that he would one day find himself trekking along an endless frozen wasteland somewhere on the Orlesian side of the Frostbacks, no purpose or destination in sight except perhaps to distance himself even further from Kirkwall than he already had, he very likely would not have believed it. Although, very few things about a life with Aurelia Hawke would have been believable to him a year ago.

For one, her antics seem to increase exponentially the further into the wintery terrain they get. She is alive in the snow. The closer to Ferelden they travel—although to Fenris, there’s little difference in the lands on either side of the mountains, only that one side Aurelia condemns and the other she calls home—the more she _thrives_ , the more she teases, the more she provokes. She is an absolute nightmare in her natural habitat, dancing about in the bitter sleet, sliding deftly over ice and twice-frozen stretches of packed-in, hardened snowfall accumulated over the course of the winter so far. She never once falls. She chirps back to him, _keep up, Fenris,_ and _I don’t mind leaving you here in Orlais, you know_ , and _you’re walking slower than a Fereldan spring thaw, honestly!_ and yet it’s all Fenris can do to remain upright on the ice, every slow and precarious step upon the slippery terrain another death wish in the back of his mind.

Every so often, she gets far enough ahead of him that he loses sight of her. And when the snow picks up and the sun, wherever it might have been behind the clouds above them, begins to set, “far enough ahead” becomes not very far at all. “Hawke!” he calls out when the visibility becomes too poor and the snow becomes too cold and he’s had enough of her running back and forth between him and the snow a hundred yards ahead. The air is still and silent around him, and his voice seems harsh and out of place in the dead of the snowy dusk. “Hawke?” he calls out again. “I was thinking we could set up…” But for every breath between words, every second he _doesn’t_ speak, there’s nothing. Absolutely silence, and absolute emptiness behind and beside and in front of him.

“Hawke...?” Fenris asks slowly, tentatively, turning around in cautious rotation for any hint of her jet black hair, bold crimson paint, ice-gray eyes. And yet he’s only met with the same massive white expanse they’ve found themselves in for days. 

“Aurelia?” he tries. 

The silence, now, is deafening. 

When he opens his mouth to call to her again, he’s answered promptly with a ball of ice to the face. 

_Absolutely not._

“AURELIA!” he roars. He hears her before he sees her now, a devilish giggle suspended in the frozen dusk as the increasing snowfall gives way to her roguish figure. When she reaches him, she yanks her scarf down from around her face, revealing a bright grin as white as the snow around her. 

“Look, if you could only keep _up_ with me—”

He doesn’t give her the opportunity to finish her thought, though, shoving her hard into the already-foot-high snow and continuing onward without a second thought. 

“ _Hey!_ ” she hollers after him, and when he’s hit in the shoulder this time with another ball of ice, it’s very much expected. 

“Keep up, Hawke,” he mutters into the dead air before him, not bothering to turn around, not bothering to grant her the satisfaction. When she does catch up with him, she’s all smiles. _Still_. “You’re going to make this a very sorry Satinalia for yourself,” he tells her. They hadn’t been keeping good track of the days since leaving Val Royeaux, but he knew the holiday was approaching.

She shrugs at him as they trudge along, side by side now. “Can’t be worse than last Satinalia,” she reasons. There’s snow in her hair, and her jacket looks a little damp from her fall. For a moment, he feels a little sorry for pushing her, but then she aims at him in revenge, lunging forward, and he ducks from her, for once _just_ a little faster. He’s not sorry anymore. Not even when her missed tackle lands her headfirst into the snow a second time. She huffs at him, defeated. For now. “ _Last_ Satinalia,” she grumbles, “you weren’t speaking to me.”

“I think it was _you_ who wasn’t speaking to _me_ ,” he corrects her, offering a hand in truce and pulling her out of the snowbank, “but that is irrelevant. I’ll gladly stop speaking with you now if you’re going to keep hurling ice at me.”

“They’re snowballs, Fenris.”

He shrugs, _all the same_ , and she prances forward once more, _damn_ her and her hot Fereldan blood. She’ll stop at nothing in this snow. He wonders if she can even feel the cold at all.

Weary, damp, and more than a little annoyed, Fenris pushes onward in the snow without her. Or maybe it’s _her_ who’s pushed on without him. Regardless, he continues walking in silence now, skies darkening above him and her footprints in the snow as the only sign keeping him on track. 

“Hawke,” he drawls; he doesn’t _care_ if he can’t see her now, she’s almost certainly within earshot, the little fox, “it’s dark. We should stop soon for camp.”

Nothing.

It hardly means she hasn’t heard him. He doesn’t repeat himself, carries on, eyes screening for any sign of a good place to stop for the night and it’s not long before he can see a bit of light in the distance, not a town—not this far out near the mountains—but a single cottage, candlelit and alone in the vast tundra. A good place to rest if there’s a barn, maybe, if there’s somewhere they might be able to slip into for the night, if they can manage to go unnoticed. If _Hawke_ can manage to keep quiet.

Just when he nears the little cottage— _small_ , he notes, there are only a couple candles lit and _maybe no one is home_ —another snowball whizzes past his head, so close that he can feel the cold of it pass his ear.

He dodges it.

It misses.

And somewhere behind him, a window shatters.

Silence and discretion from an accomplished rogue, it turns out, is just too much to ask.

“Qui est là?!” someone shouts from inside the cottage, and any hopes of staying for the night are instantly vanquished.

“Venhedis,” he breathes, and as though materializing from the falling snow, Hawke appears, barrelling into him.

“Oh, _fuck!_ ” 

He picks them both up off the ground and they scrambled forward, outward, _away_ , anything to distance themselves from the cottage and the broken window and the rapid Orlesian shouting inside. “ _Hawke_ ,” he growls; he could shove her into the snow all over again if it wouldn’t be all but a guarantee of getting themselves caught, and besides, the thick snow is already working against them enough. “You just—” he grits, sucking in cold air as they run further into the deep grey of the night, stumbling through banks of snow and the decline of the valley around them, thankful for once for the cover of darkness, “— _couldn’t_ let it go for once, could you?”

“I was—just—having— _fun_!” she hisses between breaths, flitting through the snow alongside him.

“ _Your_ fun is going to get us _killed_ one day!”

She opens her mouth for a retort, but there’s no time. The slight decline they’d been running along has come to an abrupt end, opening out into a steep drop below.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he mutters.

“Venhedis,” she whispers.

“Maybe we should—”

But this time, _this time_ when she pushes him, she does not miss. He _falls_ , tumbling headfirst into the snow, somersaulting down and down and down and down and down through cold white snow and brush and ice and it’s only after he slams tailbone-first into a tree trunk that he realizes he’s reached the bottom, and it’s only after Aurelia somersaults into a heap on top of him that he realizes she’d jumped down the hill after him.

“Wow,” she laughs— _laughs!_ —breathless, cold and wet and rosy-cheeked atop him. She rolls over, straddling him in the snow so that they’re nose to nose, grinning in spite of his pointed frown. “They won’t follow us down here, at least.”

“I hate you, Hawke,” he says simply, counting in his mind the number of bruises he’ll most certainly have come morning. “Now get off of me.”

“Mmm.” Her hair is dripping melting snow into his face, and he tries—albeit not very hard—to push her off. She doesn’t budge. “No,” she says simply.

“Hawke, you _threw_ me down a _cliff_ ,” he growls. “I am cold, I am numb, my entire _backside_ hurt and you are dripping cold water all over my face, so—”

“Fine,” she says, rolling her eyes, dropping herself closer to him, her cold damp hair brushing against his forehead. This is not what he wanted. “I’ll kiss it better, if you’re going to be such a baby about it.”

He frowns at her. “Who said I _wanted_ you to kiss me, Hawke?” he mutters, the strength of his annoyed sigh visible in the way his breath puffs out into the chilly air around the new of them. She flashes him a devious grin in return.

“Shut up,” she laughs, leaning in, and he closes his eyes, defeated. Accepting. “It’s so cold anyway, you’ll hardly feel it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Satinalia18](http://satinalia18.tumblr.com) event using the prompt "memories," which is a stretch but this is one Satinalia they're bound to remember, so...


End file.
